


saturated with the blood of an elk

by Ehlihr (ehlihr)



Category: Archive 81 (Podcast)
Genre: F/F, Gen, M/M, being in love with morgan archive 81 has its perks baby!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-22
Updated: 2020-06-22
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:26:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24863785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ehlihr/pseuds/Ehlihr
Summary: The Trucker has been chasing her for weeks. She is so thirsty. She hasn’t seen a rest stop in hours. Her banjo strings broke, and her replacement strings broke, and her replacement-replacement strings broke, and she can’t progress, and she’s fucking stuck. The Trucker is only miles away, and miles away for it is minutes.***When she wrote the song, it felt so easy.
Relationships: Static Man/Nicholas Waters (Background), The Clerk & Static Man & Nicholas Waters, The Clerk/Original Female Character
Comments: 14
Kudos: 51





	saturated with the blood of an elk

“‘The Songwriter’,” Trucker says, mockingly. “You called.” A statement, not a question.

Morgan feels her knees shake, sweat pouring down her neck. The Blacktop is so, so hot. It presses thick against her skin and breathing feels like fire. The wet, bloody exhaust of the Trucker makes her feel nauseous.

***

There is a woman passing through the Blacktop. She looks at, or through, Morgan like she isn’t a person, which she supposes she isn’t, anymore. She asks for “A black coffee, Sugar. No sugar, though,” and Morgan gives her a tight smile and retrieves the motor oil-like substance that the diner makes.

The woman plays with a gold ring in between her fingers. Her eyes stare at the jukebox hungrily. Morgan does not ask her any questions.

***

Her paper is going badly. She has spent  _ hours _ on  _ hours  _ researching this god awful topic - diatonic set theory papers laid out in front of her as she tries to find some pattern a dozen other musicologists haven’t found before.

Funding is hard to come by. Always has been, always will. Putting forward ideas and theories and a board manager will lean forward and say, “Oh, well Miss - sorry, I will not butcher your last name today - Morgan, your idea is… it’s interesting, it is. But we need to know the long term goals with regards to how we can  _ use  _ these ideas. We need a bigger picture.”

There is an unspoken but heavy thing -  _ how can we sell this? How can we capitalize? _

Morgan grits her teeth behind her lips, can feel the man’s eyes trace her jaw’s twitch. She opens her portfolio to an unconvincing sheet that outlines unconvincing statistics about unconvincing products that can be produced to sell and generate capital off of  _ musicology _ .

She checks the clock. Three in the morning is too late to be staring at her computer screen, so she closes it.

***

The Trucker has been chasing her for weeks. She is so thirsty. She hasn’t seen a rest stop in hours. Her banjo strings broke, and her replacement strings broke, and her replacement-replacement strings broke, and she can’t progress, and she’s fucking stuck. The Trucker is only miles away, and miles away for it is minutes.

***

When she wrote the song, it felt so easy.

Create a stringed instrument of any kind from a tree grown in soil at least a twenty-three miles from a lake, saturated with the blood of an elk. String it with the gut of an animal dead before its fourth birthday. Lather the body with honey and your own spit. Stand in the parking lot of a Walmart built more than ten years ago. Say to yourself - “Purification, the world of the City calls to me, Purification, the song of the City calls to me, Purification, the Sun of the City calls to me.” Repeat three times, and you will hear notes in your head. Play these notes once on your instrument, and improvise over them as you walk south-east in order to progress, and once the song is completed, you will find ground through which the body of your purposes may grow.

She wondered as the instructions came to her:  _ When is a song ever complete? _

Her musicology degree screams of resolution of harmonics and the progression of notes to a key centre- her magic screams of blood and home.

***

Her voice is so low, smooth with the sound of a smile in it. The woman’s skin is unblemished and warm-toned. Her face is centred by her strong nose and her strong brows. Her rich black hair is braided and long, and her beaded jewellery makes no noise as it sways against itself. Her clothes are too clean to be natural, but Morgan can see the blood under her fingernails. She is radiant. 

Morgan knows she will die. No one (well, almost no one) completes a song in the Blacktop. The woman sips her coffee, looking directly through her.

***

The internet forums are truly so interesting. She tears them apart letter by letter. She sees the notes on the page, in the pixels, generates ideas and thoughts that give her a renewed interest in her field, and a  _ new  _ interest in the esoteric. She’s hungered for this.

***

Moody’s is... not bad, honestly. It’s strange and its evil presses down on her neck, but so did the world of academia and she managed there for a nearly decade. Moody’s is smooth and easy. Time passes over her like the slick of a rest stop’s time should. Nothing here is permanent. She is everywhere and nowhere. She has not eaten in minutes, hours, years.

Perhaps the part of her that is driven, that yearned for the God’s Song (or Gods’ Song, or God Song, or-) is slamming its fists against her ribs, begging to be free from the drawl of this place, this awful dusty place. The complacency is wearing it thin. Morgan used to feel it with every breath- the fear and the desperation to escape, to find her song, to go home. But if she goes home, what will she become? She has already failed the only thing she sought out to do. She is a part of the Blacktop now. To go home would make her whole body wear thin, too.

She takes three drops of the woman’s blood. “Thanks, sweetpea.” Her voice resonates, going through the air as though it was meant to go through the particles of dust and land in Morgan’s ears just so. The thing behind her ribs is paused, enamoured. The woman hadn’t even flinched when Morgan touched her neutral skin, hadn’t winced when the machinery screamed for her blood.

***

The cassette falls out of the thing she grew. The mottled flesh of the plant dissolves away, its purpose fulfilled, and she picks up the cassette, turning it over in her shaking hands. On the title plate, it simply reads “HITCHHIKER” in bold, typed text. She puts it in her pocket.

***   
  


This man and his… thing, are new to the Blacktop. She smells the power on him like the gasoline of his awful car. He asks so many questions. He orders literally the grossest thing on the menu, which is saying something- Moody’s sells some of the worst mozzarella sticks Morgan has ever seen. His anxious, quiet voice is so deeply grating on her nerves, she can’t hold back the snap in her own. This place will eat him alive.

His stupid friend is awful. Dancing with him is awful. His questions are awful. When they leave Moody’s, she prays she’ll never see them again.

***

She is pliant under the woman’s strong hands. Even like this, the woman looks through her like she isn’t a person, just a part of this place for her to absorb under her fingernails. She doesn’t mind. Morgan has never felt like a person.

***

“You sure you wanna go through with this, kid?”

_ YES, _ the thing in her ribs screams. But she is shaking so badly. The banjo has dissolved under her weathered hands. “No,” she says, quietly.

The Trucker seems satisfied. “... Walk with me,” it says. And she walks beside it for miles and miles. The sun never moves from the middle of the sky. 

She sees the building in front of her.  _ Moody’s Diner and Eatery _ stands old and empty. It looks abandoned, but also as though it had never been used. There is something wrong about the mascot, that seems to stare straight at her, face pulled in a disgusting grimace. Her blood vessels push against her skin towards the place.

His gravelly, Other-like voice hits her like- well. “You can become a part of this place. Serve it. Or, you can try to leave. Your call.”

“Leave? Or  _ try _ to leave?” she asks, looking at the faded sign. 

“What did I say?”

Morgan is quiet for a moment. “I’ll stay.”

“Good choice, clerk,” the Trucker says, and drives away without a word.

***

She never sees the woman again. She knows, somewhere, there is a streak of blood and tires and bone being licked up and taken apart by the vulture-like scavengers of the Blacktop.

***

She sees the idiots again, and again, and again. “Nicholas” offers her power. “Static Man” offers her pancakes.

She isn’t sure what part of them isn’t understanding the heaviness of this place.  _ Can’t you feel it? _ She wants to snap, shaking them by the shoulders.  _ Can’t you feel the press of the sun and humid air? The scarred weight of Michael Waters’s legacy? Doesn’t it make you want to lie down and let it wash over you? Don’t you want to just give up? _

She didn’t think she had forgotten the drive of chasing the song. How moving through the Blacktop made you feel alive in a way that wasn’t real. Like you were more than human. How it honed whatever magic you had and made it sharp. She has been standing still for so long the song stood still with her, in a rested note that hasn’t gotten the conductors cue to go. Or maybe, the conductor had given her the cue, and she had simply walked off the stage in cowardice.  _ Keep your head down _ , she scoffs to herself.  _ Lay low _ .

***

She watches the Pacifier behind her eyelids again, thinking of her niece. Her niece’s face is missing from her mind, but her confusion at the film is not. She does not think that it is a coincidence that Moody’s likes to remind her of the last thing she did with a family member through these unplayable DVDs. 

***

Nicholas’s friend is dangerous and powerful in the obvious ways - he is sharp and violent. Morgan thought that even if he could survive this place, his human… friend? Master? Something else? - anyway, she thought that Nicholas would be pulverized like all the others, like the woman that reeked of more power than Nicholas did. But she sees now, the space he occupies, the way he exerts his will. He is stronger than first impressions give, and the way she feels looking at him reminds him of the way the strangers that have passed through talked about Michael Waters.

_ “He’s dead now,”  _ Nicholas had said.  _ “I killed him.”  _ He had looked down at himself, meek suddenly. “ _ I hope that doesn’t make you think less of me,”  _ he had said, like he really cared that she may think less of him for such a thing. Maybe she should. It makes her stomach clench with guilt at comparing the two. Michael Waters exerted his will uncaringly and in the attempt to gain power. Nicholas was only in the Blacktop to get a body for his friend, it seemed. Maybe she was being naive, but she really wanted to believe that maybe he was decent.

***

There is something chasing her. She is playing her song and running, and her feet are bleeding and bleeding and the thing is a  _ truck  _ and she isn’t sure how it hasn’t caught her yet but its voice of gravel and metal and meat overlays the song in her head she is so desperately trying to play in tune to. It calls her an invader, the Songwriter, like it’s a title instead of a description. She keeps running until the engine fades behind her, her fingers never leaving the fretboard.

***

“Do you wanna know what I’ve  _ learned  _ about this place, sugar?” the woman had asked, not waiting for an answer, “It is  _ hungry _ for us.”

“Us?” Morgan mutters.

“Me,” the woman corrects. “It wants to bite into me and drain me of my power, wants me to become welded to this place like solder to wire. I can feel that want like acid on metal - it wants to  _ erode _ me until I am nothing but the sweat that this place makes. The dirt and grain that goes on forever on the side of the road is a  _ mirage _ \- it sits still and waiting, it wants us to think it is nothing and empty but it is  _ not. Empty.  _ It is full of the life of this place.” She takes a long sip of her coffee. “I took off my shoes the other night, at the motel. I put my feet in the dirt and looked up. And, on the beings of that other place I swear- I could feel the ground breathe and moan in its hunger. It will warp me unless I strain, and I have always strained. I strained to be here, to drink this god-awful coffee, to get to the end of the expanse. And I will, you understand?”

Morgan stares at her. She wants to ask what she wants, what she could possibly be doing here in the Blacktop, what power she craves. It doesn’t matter. The Blacktop will purge her soon enough, and her words are already wasted enough on Morgan. So she doesn’t ask.

Her grin is wolfish and perfect. “You understand.”

***

Nicholas Waters is not decent, she decides, as she watches him manipulate the husk of the thing that pretends to be his mother, cracking his voice and dancing with her. But, he vowed to drop the leads to his fathers’ loose ends. He offered her payment as a genuine thanks. He really is trying to help his friend, even if the power it’s getting him is less than incidental. He offers her an out. It makes her think of her first-year philosophy class - questions of intent, effect, action. Nicholas was a utilitarian’s dream - all the wrong reasons, all the right impacts.

She accepts his out; laughs at Static Man’s excitement at having her be part of the team. Nicholas smiles, small and genuine as she climbs into the backseat, dazed. These could be her friends- the concept so foreign and distant it chokes her with its sudden presence.

The blood and oil in the tank growl as the car jumps to life. “Seatbelts,” Nicholas says haughtily at Static Man. Morgan leans back, seeing the pinprick of a highway exit miles away that she hadn’t seen in the infinitum of her existence in the Blacktop. The thing behind her ribs  _ sings _ .

**Author's Note:**

> [THINKS ABOUT MORGAN ARCHIVE 81 MORE THAN THE NORMAL AMOUNT]
> 
> I'm (again) on most social as @ehlihr - come talk to me!


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